The story of Nestor Makhno through film

The Makhnovist movement was one of the rare anarchist-communist insurrections in history, if not the only one, capable of holding a territory for a number of years (from 1917 to 1921). The film that follows returns to the traces of these revolutionary workers and peasants almost eighty years after their defeat.

For the centenary of the russian revolution, recall that during this period, the partisans of the political police and the gulag were not the only ones to hold ground. It was necessary for them to defeat a libertarian movement that during a first moment they had to ally with to be able to defeat the german invaders and the counter-revolutionaries, and which it was then necessary to consciously erase their memory after having betrayed them and physically eliminated them.

Soviet power did everything to condemn this movement to the mists of the past, did everything to disqualify it, painting its members as anti-semitic brigands. But twenty years ago, the memory of the Makhnovist movement was still alive in Makhno’s village, Huliaipole.

Nestor Makhno, A peasant from the Ukraine (Documentary by Hélène Châtelain, 1995 – in french) …